Adobe has become something of a household name. Founded in 1982, the Mountain View company is best known for creating the ubiquitous image-editing software Photoshop. With decades of growth, and a fervent group of product evangelists that rely on Adobe's products for their livelihoods, any smart business owner would ask the obvious question: what could I learn from Adobe's success? Let's take a look at their premiere piece of software to answer that.
Build a Great Product
First released in 1990, Photoshop has become the top image-editing, and graphics-creation tool for a variety of industries. Graphic designers, visual effects artists, game creators, and many others rely on Photoshop's sophisticated suite of tools and complex algorithms to rapidly make alterations to images. When the Merriam-Webster dictionary begins to define Photoshop as a transitive verb, you know the software has some real influence.
Grassroots Evangelism
Seeing this success spurred Adobe into recruiting some of the top designers in the field, and turned them into product evangelists. These are people who used Photoshop and its accompanying software packages, collectively known as Creative Suite, in their careers on a daily basis. With this small army of cheerleaders, Adobe set out to influence and educate other graphics professionals. Even people who considered themselves proficient at their craft could stand to learn a thing or three from these Photoshop masters. Having such highly visible members of an industry touting the benefits of Adobe software, further cemented their place as the go-to brand when you needed quality image-editing done.
Moving their Software Online
Technology is always changing, and Adobe realized this when they decided to move their entire Creative Suite catalog online and offer it as a cloud-based subscription service. Pushing everything to the cloud offered numerous benefits to both Adobe and its customers, chief among them a lower cost. Prior to this shift, the full Creative Suite collection cost thousands of dollars. Moving to a subscription model dropped that to under a hundred per month. The software is also easier to update, and can painlessly interface with other online applications. Adobe's usage of an application optimized storage for the hosting of their star software package was a brilliant move that benefits both customers and Adobe itself.
Smart usage of online storage solutions is critical if you run a business that deals with large sets of data. For Adobe, it was their entire Creative Suite. Cloud storage solutions could confer on your business the same benefits they conferred to Adobe. The question you should now ask yourself is: can cloud storage solutions do for my business what they did for Adobe?
About The Author:
Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and recent graduate of the University of New Mexico. She lives in Los Lunas where she writes, spends her time outdoors, and tries all the new food she can. Contact her via Twitter @BrookeChaplan.
